Sometimes, people are hampered by a certain intimidation factor when it comes to difficult texts. They feel that they are too uneducated, haven’t read such-and-such books that ought to come before, need the for-dummies introductory version, and need someone to hold their hand while offering them a glass of milk.
Habermas, on the other hand, talks more about procedural popular sovereignty. The difference with Arendt lies in his understanding of autonomy. Whereas Arendt, like Carl Schmitt, identifies political autonomy with a specific public space in which citizens confront each other face to face, for Habermas, Kelsen, and Luhmann autonomy is a characteristic of a specific …
The analysis of myths does not and cannot have the aim of showing how people think. And if by means of the myths we can identify certain archaic or figurative expressions of our own folk language, the same observation is made statement, since we, for our part, are retroactively becoming aware from the outside and …
Kant’s conception of God was the author of divine commandments. Human obligation towards one’s fellow being started from these commandments, which Kant called “statutory commandments.” But the actual legislators of moral commandments were human beings themselves: God was the author of divine legislation, but moral legislation was self-created and self-directed by human conscience.
